1. Field of Invention
This invention pertains to a cotton acquisition and tracking system. More particularly, this invention pertains to a system that receives a cotton sample, removes a sub-sample for testing while other sample testing is performed.
2. Description of the Related Art
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) administers programs that facilitate the efficient, fair marketing of U.S. agricultural products, including food, fiber, and specialty crops. One of the programs of the Cotton and Tobacco Programs (C&T) is the Grading and Classing program for cotton. The Grading and Classing program for cotton classifies cotton samples taken from full bales at gin locations and transported to designated testing laboratories. The objective of the Grading and Classing program for cotton is to facilitate interstate and foreign commerce in cotton by providing official quality determinations that aid in marketing. The USDA AMS accomplishes this objective by inspecting, identifying, and certifying that product quality is in accordance with official standards. The program determines the quality of the current crop and of the annual carryover. Cotton standardization ensures uniformity in grading and classing.
Grading and classing cotton is a labor intensive operation conducted within a short time after the crop is picked. Samples are taken from full bales at gin locations. The samples are then transported to a testing laboratory. There, the sample is identified and tested. Testing is done with fiber testing instruments. The various tests includes determining the color grade and the leaf grade of American Upland Cotton, the grades of American Pima Cotton, the fiber length, Length Uniformity Index, fiber strength, Micronaire, trash, and color. High Volume Instruments (HVI) are used for the classification of all Upland and American Pima cotton. Additionally, trash and color are determined by HVI equipment.
The testing laboratories operate under strict climate requirements for cotton testing of 70 degrees F., plus or minus 1 degree and 65 percent relative humidity plus or minus 2 percent. The cotton fiber reacts to changes in moisture. Therefore, it is necessary to condition all samples to the testing laboratory environment prior to testing. It is common to use Rapid Conditioning Units (RCU) for active conditioning. The RCU is a mechanism that conveys trays of samples along an air plenum that has conditioned air that conditions the cotton quickly (usually in less than 15 minutes from start to finish). The samples then move to a laboratory where HVIs test the characteristics of fiber properties and the corresponding data is then made available for the cotton industry to use to market cotton worldwide. Each HVI has a cycle time, but depends upon an operator to manually retrieve the main cotton samples from plastic trays, pull three (3) sub-samples from each of those samples, and load those sub-samples into pre-determined locations on the HVI to test for fiber length, strength, uniformity, and Micronaire (fineness and maturity). In addition, the operator places the remainder of the main sample in a designated location on the HVI to test fiber color and trash content. These instruments are solely relied upon by USDA and the domestic and international cotton industries to provide accurate and timely classification data for the marketing stream. The test data is transmitted in real time, as samples are tested, to mainframe computers and made available to owners or agents of the cotton all over the world.
The USDA AMS is considered the world's leader in HVI testing and tests virtually every bale of cotton grown in the U.S. each year (approximately 15-18 million samples on average in a typical year). Speed, accuracy and efficiency are key components of the operation. The current system relies upon multiple operators to perform these tests. The human element, despite training and experience, is always susceptible to error and inefficiencies. For example, a human operator pulls multiple sub-samples from each primary sample. The sub-samples are susceptible to variations of size, location, transport and handling, and placement into the HVI equipment. These variations potentially effect the consistency and accuracy of the measurements.